


a tall ship and a star

by thisparticularlight



Category: Scrubs (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Starfleet AU, because why not, star trek crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:42:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27121303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisparticularlight/pseuds/thisparticularlight
Summary: "People go to space for lots of different reasons."Eight years in JD's life, starting with the Starfleet recruiting station, and ending with "I can't believe there was ever a time I wasn't certain I was going to leave Ohio".
Relationships: Perry Cox/John "JD" Dorian
Comments: 10
Kudos: 22





	a tall ship and a star

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure the world needed a Scrubs Starfleet AU, but I am who I am and so I am here on this Tuesday morning to send it out into the world anyway.
> 
> In the interest of full transparency, this is basically a quick world-building intro for a universe that will eventually be full of loosely-bound one-shots because I just cannot WAIT to be writing about these idiots in space constantly.
> 
> For the record, here is the full list of songs that go with each character:
> 
> Overland, by I'm With Her (Dan)  
> Satellite, by Guster (Turk)  
> Ends of the Earth, by Lord Huron (Elliot)  
> Do You Realize??, by the Flaming Lips (Carla)  
> To Be Still, by Alela Diane (Perry)

_Flying at Night | Ted Kooser_

_Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.  
_ _Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies  
_ _like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,  
_ _some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,  
_ _snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn  
_ _back into the little system of his care.  
_ _All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,  
_ _tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his._

  
  


_goodbye brother, hello railroad  
_ _(dan)_

People go to space for lots of different reasons. Some people go because they’re running away from something; some people go because they’re looking for something. Some people aren’t even sure how to explain it; everyone goes to space to look for an answer, but sometimes it’s hard to understand the questions before the exact moment they’re resolved. 

John Dorian goes to space because sometimes, the weight of how beautiful the entire world is just _crushes_ him, straight down through his collarbones and his spine and his ribs, straight down his feet into the earth he’s walked on, wide-eyed and quick-footed, for eighteen years. He goes to space because it feels like the only way to live under this unfathomable weight is to follow every ray of light as far out as he can possibly imagine, chasing a horizon just to see how far it goes. He goes to space because, while the image of _a life that fits neatly around my shoulders, a life I can bite down on and settle into_ is blurry and out-of-focus, he still knows it isn’t on Earth. 

He isn’t built for it, really. He picks up a Starfleet Academy brochure for the first time when he’s seventeen and he flips through it, slowly checking “pass” on all the tracks: engineering, security, ops. No, no, no. Command… _God_ , no. 

Science is _almost_ right. He’d cradled a lily in his hand that afternoon on his walk from the high school to the recruiting station, and he’d peered carefully at its stamen, bright yellow and dusty in the October light, and he’d thought: _is there anything on Earth more perfect than you?_ And then he’d thought: _or anywhere else?_ And in that moment he’d known, after months of his mother gently—and then not-gently—reminding him that by the end of the winter, he needed to make a plan: someday he would find out.

Scientists take things apart, though. They do so deliberately, of course, and with great concern and respect for what they dismantle, but it’s a dismantling nonetheless: they carve out cross-sections and pin them onto glass. They take things apart, just to see how they work. And as he stares at the stamen, feeling a little sneezy in spite of himself as the pollen works its way into his sinuses, he knows, just as surely as he knows that someday, his body will bow and bend under the weight of space, that his place isn’t _quite_ as a science officer.

“There’s a medical track,” the recruiter says to him, letting her eyes slide over his transcripts, noting his predilection for anatomy, physiology, and chemistry. “You would declare your intent during your time at the Academy, and then you would apply for Starfleet Medical Academy during your third year. It’s another four years, and then you’d enlist into Starfleet Medical, and be assigned from there.”

“Starfleet Medical.” JD rolls the words around in his mouth, letting them settle in behind his teeth before swallowing them down, letting them settle into his body, carefully observing how the idea feels as it makes a home in his bones.

It feels… it feels good. He smiles. He can’t help it. He never can.

“It’s a competitive life, but…” The recruiter’s eyes drift over his transcripts once again, and he closes his eyes against the story she’s allowing herself to compose from the dots the document’s given her: painfully average performance all the way through grade eight, when it was as if his first biology class had physically gripped him by the shoulders and shaken him until he sat up straight, head forward and spine stacked as he’d tracked a perfect 4.0 through high school for want of nothing other than to avoid closing any doors; he’d never known how to frame out what he’d wanted, exactly, other than knowing that it started with _more_.

“But you’re up to it, I think,” she finishes, and he startles; he’d nearly forgotten she was still in the room, let alone speaking.

She sends him away with a handful of literature. He throws away everything except the pamphlet labeled “Preparing Your Application” before he lets himself imagine being overwhelmed by saving all of it.

“How was your day?” his mother asks over dinner, and he shrugs.

“Fine.”

She smiles, thin and close-lipped. “Good.”

Barbara Dorian, he knows, doesn’t want to hear more for the same reason that he’d needed to throw most of the Starfleet pamphlet away the second he’d gotten home: sometimes there isn’t room for very much, in an already overfull life, beyond the bare essentials. He’d needed to know how to apply and known that any other questions at this point would paralyze him, and not open any doors, and _god_ , but he needs all the open doors he can find. There isn’t very much that runs through his mother’s veins that she’s managed to throw and he’s managed to catch, but this— _I can only hear as much about today as it takes to make sure you’re okay if I want to have enough left over for tomorrow_ —this, he understands.

“Getting close to the end of the semester,” observes Dale, who is his third stepfather, and the first who seems to be making a genuine effort. Dale, unlike any of the Dorians, born or made, almost always seems to have enough for today and tomorrow. He likes Dale. He hopes Dale sticks. “Have you thought any more about what you might want to do next fall, Johnny? You don’t want to… well, you want to make sure you...” His stepfather falters, not knowing how to complete the sentence with Dan at his immediate left, staring down at his pasta and twirling it around his fork with an intensity that makes JD wonder whether he’s leaving gouges at the bottom of the bowl.

 _It isn’t your fault_ , he thinks at Dan, who can’t hear him think a thing that isn’t really true anyway.

He’s seventeen and on some level he knows that it’s goddamn ridiculous that there’s supposed to be something magical hiding out in the next six months that will make him ready to know what he wants to do with his life by the time April rolls around, especially because “marvel forever at pretty things” doesn’t seem to be an appropriate selection, no matter how joyfully he’d promise to tell everyone about them if it were.

“I’m still not really sure,” he says. “I’m thinking… I’m thinking maybe something medical.”

It’s the first time he’s even really thought about it, at least as a thing that could really be _his_ , so of course he’s saying it out loud, and just like that, the entire tone of the table shifts. His mother looks at him with the sort of open-mouthed smile he sometimes forgets about, if it’s been long enough, and he’s just as dazzled by her as he is every time she wears it. Next to him, Dan’s shoulders are curling into his chest, the same as they always do when Barbara Dorian’s teeth are shining at something that isn’t him, but there’s a strange, new thread in there, too, as Dan seems to be trying to figure out how to slink away from Barbara and grow toward JD with interest in equal measure.

“ _Really_ ,” says his stepfather, who somehow finds the words first. His tone is so genuinely proud and approving that JD hates himself a little for not being able to squash down the irrepressible first instinct of wondering whether his dad’s voice would sound so pleased. “You do have a knack for that sort of thing… Johnny, I think that’d be just wonderful.”

What’s important to understand about the Dorian family’s dinner table is that it isn’t a table where most of the choices most of the people sitting around it make are ever labeled as anything like “just wonderful”, and what’s important to understand about John Dorian is how hungry his heart is.

“Yeah, I think so too,” he replies, smiling easily at his stepfather. It feels like trying on a shirt for the first time in a dressing room and looking in the mirror to find that it fits perfectly.

And _to find that it fits perfectly_ is no small thing. Most things about JD feel _too much_ for his family. His feelings have always been all wrong: unwieldy, sticking out at the most inconvenient times, sobbing over roadkill or centuries-old plagues or the relative lifespan of pets to their owners. His love has always spilled over and hit sour notes: _why on_ _earth_ _would you want to do that_ , his mother had demanded, the first time he’d asked if he could call his first stepfather on the phone, and he hadn’t known how to answer because it genuinely hadn’t occurred to him that all three of them might not miss him, this man who had hung his hat on the rack and cleaned off the dinner table every night and taken them to the beach in the summer for four years, and who had then disappeared overnight as if he’d never sat for a family photo alongside them.

His ambition, too, has slowly—inevitably—been growing into _too much_. Where Barbara and Dan used to look at his report cards with a fond teasing, he now sees worried frowns from his mother and bad-natured grumbling from his brother, and so he _knows,_ somewhere behind his ribs, long before he knows it behind his eyes, that he is lucky that in this family, _maybe something medical_ will carry them through a number of seasons, and that he ought not to rush it. Nobody, outside him, needs to know that even as he imagines heartbeats, he dreams of the stars. 

Dan finds everything important, though, no matter how carefully he hides it, and so of course he finds the Academy brochure slotted carefully between his mattresses not a week into December.

“You would leave,” Dan accuses, as if a small grey house in Ohio is such an absurd thing to imagine waving goodbye to. “And _soon_.”

The words are meant to hurt, he knows; they’re meant to feel like a jab, something stitching themselves into threads of obligation and guilt and keeping him tied to the earth. He almost feels bad for Dan, in that moment, because hearing them said aloud like that feels like when their dad—their _real_ dad—had taken them to South Carolina and taught them to hear the ocean in seashells: it feels like something so big that before now he’d scarcely been able to conceive it has been shrunken down into something he can hold in his hand and then slip into his pocket, carrying from bedroom to bedroom and tracing before he falls asleep.

“I’m thinking about it,” JD replies carefully, because it isn’t a lie: _oh, God, I’m thinking about it, about how very much of everything there is, and about being able to see as much of it as I possibly can_.

“I thought you meant, like… Dr O’Neill,” Dan finishes weakly, bringing up their pediatrician, who has practiced a mile and a half up the road from them for decades.

“No,” JD whispers. It feels like something permanent is breaking. JD hadn’t even known there was ever anything permanent on the table. “No, not like that.”

“Well, cool.” Dan frowns and throws the Academy brochure back onto JD’s bed with the exact same face he’s been using to frown at his report cards for years now. “That’s great, JD. That’s really great.”

“What were you even doing in here?”

“Hoping you’ll grow into a semi-decent porn habit someday.” Dan smiles sardonically. “Shoulda known I’d find a brochure for smart nerdy kids who can’t wait to get the fuck out before I ever found a decent pair of tits.”

_Ladies and gentlemen, my brother: who over the course of a single sentence can take me from ‘I want you to come with me’ to ‘you see it’s exactly this kind of shit right here, actually’._

“Go snooping around in people’s mattresses and I think you kind of resign yourself to taking whatever you get,” JD sniffs, with the sort of bristling-over-the-hurt tone he’s been perfecting for decades. He’s never known whether Dan’s matching tone is something Dan’s been practicing, too, or whether Dan really is just bristly. He’s never known what it would be like to say, _here, I’ll put mine down first_ , whether Dan would set his down too and they’d act happy to see each other at the dinner table, or whether he’d just be opening up a soft underbelly that Dan would be only too happy to pounce on.

“What’s _new_ ,” Dan mumbles, in a funny sort of charade of the exact tone JD had just been trying to imagine ever hearing out of his older brother. “Hey, don’t forget us little people when you’re up there, okay?”

 _I won’t,_ is the right answer, and JD knows it, the same way he’s known all the right answers since he sat up straight the first morning of eighth-grade biology and decided that if his only Thing could be knowing everything, well then… shoot, he was just gonna know everything, huh? But what comes out of his mouth instead is: “Well, out there. I don’t think they let you actually go _up_ anywhere for at least the first few years.”

Dan squints for a long time. A _long_ time. Long enough to where JD starts to squirm, same as he always has because goddammit he’s just never known what anyone in this family is looking for when they look at him like that. “Right. Well, I guess you’re pretty good at remembering, anyway?”

“Yeah, pretty good.”

Also not the right answer. 

Whatever. If they’re anything, they’re resilient. JD’s got seventeen years of wrong answers and a brother who keeps coming into his room anyway to back him up on that one.

_shining like a work of art  
_ _(turk)_

Two years to the day after he meets Turk for the first time, JD (who _is_ in fact now JD, and doesn't _that_ feel good) realizes that there is in fact a downside to meeting someone that makes you think: _oh,_ _this_ _is what the other half of my heart looks like_. 

What really sneaks up on him is that Turk looks so dang _happy_ when he bursts into their dorm room, the same one JD avoids thinking of as _tiny_ because if his wildest dreams come true, then the room they’ll share at Starfleet Medical will be even smaller than the one they share here at the Academy, and the one they’ll share after that on their first med ship will be even smaller than _that_ , and… well, _we’ll have to find somewhere to keep all the balloons_ , is what he’d said out loud, the first time he’d thought about it, and Turk had just looked at him for a moment and then burst into a grin and said, _dude,_ _totally_ , which… are we seeing, now, what it means to have found the other half of your heart? Anyway, he avoids thinking of their room as tiny, is the point. And so when Turk bursts into their perfectly average dorm room, cheeks bright red with the wind and practically out of breath, it doesn’t even occur to JD to do anything but put the book he’d been reading down on the table next to him and let all of Turk’s joyful nervous energy soak into him until he explodes back with: “Dude, what’s up?”, because the only thing he ever wants is to share whatever’s got Turk looking like _this_. Except:

“Dude, flying is amazing,” Turk gasps. 

And that is _not_ in the plan.

This is exactly the danger of letting Christopher Turk nestle comfortably into his position as the north star of your sky: he is good at everything, and there is adventure in his heart. In JD’s experience, one of those two things are true of everyone at Starfleet Academy, but it’s rare to find them both rooting the same person.

Then again, everything about Turk has been rare, since the day JD met him and vowed to spend his entire life trying to keep up.

“I kind of want to change tracks,” Turk continues, that same breathless exhilarated feeling tracing through his words, and something funny and scared twists in JD’s gut before he can even register the words.

He should have known, really, the moment Turk had started talking about signing up for this piloting elective. _You don’t even need to know_ _how_ _to fly_ , JD had pointed out, and Turk had shrugged and _said_ something about never knowing when you’ll need to perform an emergency medi-craft landing, and JD had known he’d _meant_ something about action movies and hot chicks—which, right. That’s Turk-and-JD-101, is action movies and hot chicks. But JD hadn’t had time for electives, and hadn’t really spent a lot of time considering that Turk would elect into something that JD hadn’t been a part of, anyway, and now here they all are: this is _exactly_ what happens when you don’t carefully consider the downsides. There are so many ways the other half of your heart can decide to leave, you know? It’s not _all_ explosions and divorces. Sometimes it’s just… electives, and electing to be someplace the other half of your heart… isn’t. And since when had he stopped carefully considering the downsides, anyway? That’s his whole _thing_ , is careful consideration, and knowing all the answers even if they’re _not_ explosions or divorces. Dammit! He can’t be _lieve_ that here in Year 2 at the Academy he’s all of a sudden going to start failing tests _over answers he already knew_. This is insane. Horrible. The worst.

“That’s awesome, dude,” he replies—somehow—because that’s exactly what Turk would do for him, if after all these years, he found something he really loved.

 _Do_ _not_ _overthink that if_ , he instructs himself, and he’s struck by how mean it comes out; JD doesn’t usually talk to himself in ways that come anywhere near cruel, but in this case he actually comes pretty close in spite of himself, because it’s the only way he can think of to make sure that he doesn’t cry in front of Turk.

He hopes, desperately, that he’s nailing _I’m so excited for you_ rather than _please, please, oh please don’t leave me_. On some level, he’s been expecting this moment since move-in day at the Academy, the two of them jumping up and down with excitement at the knowledge that even though they chose to room blind, they were both hopefuls for Starfleet Medical, because things like this just don’t _happen_ for him, right? Things like Christopher Duncan Turk just don’t _happen_ to people like John Michael Dorian; it’s miraculous enough that JD _met_ him, let alone that he’d ever get to _keep_ him. 

But Turk really _is_ good at everything, which apparently includes reading his best friend like a book jacket, so he frowns a little.

“I mean, I _wouldn’t_ ,” he continues, looking sidelong at JD as he performs JD’s favorite magic trick in the entire universe: addressing JD’s feelings directly without ever saying them out loud. “I don’t want _anything_ like I want to be a doctor.”

The relief that courses through him feels sharp and visceral, and JD registers, dimly, that something in him has changed: nothing— _nothing_ —has ever felt quite like being ripped apart the way that thirty seconds of thinking that Turk might not be vined throughout his entire future did… and JD is a man who left his entire family on some pretty not-great terms to be here. 

_Oh_ , he realizes; he’d always thought it would feel scary or overwhelming or too-big to realize that your home was encompassed by another person, but it actually just feels… well, it feels a lot like coming home. 

_Oh._

“I really can’t wait to be a doctor,” Turk says that night in the cafeteria. He’s speaking around an egg salad sandwich and nothing about the way that he’s talking or chewing or holding his sandwich is the least bit careful which means that the whole procedure is more than a little disgusting, but JD couldn’t care less. “It’s going to be so awesome.”

“Yeah.”

“We’re going to have the _best_ time,” Turk continues, proving that whenever Turk emphasizes anything, even around a mouthful of sandwich that definitely qualifies as “more than a little disgusting”, it’s going to make JD sit up straight, like it’s the first day of eighth-grade biology all over again, as he decides to pay attention and take notes to what is apparently the direction of the rest of his life.

Because that’s it, isn’t it? He thinks about how cruelly he’d spoken to himself, jarring and out of character, when he’d been trying to convince himself that the _if_ in _if he’d ever found something he loved that much_ was really a _when_ , and then he thinks about how Turk never even left him alone with the tears he’d been so afraid were coming, and then he thinks about how this man is so clumsy with his feelings and so insistent, anyway, and he realizes: yes, this _is_ it, and for years he’s been paying attention and taking notes because maybe sometimes your heart just knows before your head does that you’ve already found the direction of the rest of your life.

“The best,” JD echoes. If he’d imagined this moment as a teenager, he thinks he would have imagined it gauzy and melodramatic, but instead it just feels like the two of them are standing up straight, shoulder to shoulder and ready to take on the entire goddamn universe and he finds that Turk’s right: _they are going to have the absolute best time together_. “I can’t wait,” he says, in that same unfettered, uncomplicated joyful tone. Nothing gauzy or melodramatic here.

Other than, you know. Everything.

_wayfarin’ strangers and all kinds of dangers  
_ _(elliot)_

“What’s your specialty?” he asks Elliot, who, in the year’s most unexpected development, feels like a breath of fresh air, during their second shift together.

He hadn’t realized, after spending the last eight years glued to Turk’s side, that he’d even _needed_ fresh air. But the thing about Turk, the thing about JD… the thing about _them_ is that Turk moves through the world like no matter where he is, he was meant to be there. And JD… a very charitable reading is that JD does _not_ move through the world that way. Another very charitable reading (the only kind he’s accepting these days, really) is that JD is still learning how he moves through the world. And so when Elliot crashes into said world, headfirst _and_ feetfirst, somehow, with the overwhelming impression that she is both _absolutely_ meant to be there _and_ terrified of having found herself anywhere at all… well, wherever Elliot is, he wants to be there, too.

“I’m doing the command track,” Elliot tells him, which is so confusing that he just stops where he’s at.

The medbay is quiet at 0300, which is the sort of shift you find yourself assigned, when you’re an intern. He finds himself grateful for this, somehow—and isn’t the universe just endlessly full of surprises? he _knew_ it—because he has a million questions for her.

“Wait, what? I thought you were a doctor.”

“I am.” She shifts uncomfortably. “But I… you can apply for a command specialty. Instead of. Uh. You know. A medical specialty.”

“So you’re just… command?”

“Yeah.” She swallows. “I think I want to be a med captain. My dad…”

 _Don’t care about your dad_ , JD thinks. He knows it already; he’s known Elliot for three days, but he already knows that he cares for her very much which means in turn that he cares for her dad very little. Father figures are important—he should know, he’s on his sixth—and after all of this studying, he’s concluded that the responsibility is sacred: dads teach you how to move through the world, and Elliot’s seems to have filled her all up with dreams and doubt, which is really when you think about it a very cruel combination. He thinks about Turk—all his talent and adventure—and then looks at Elliot—all her dreams and doubt—and all of a sudden realizes that maybe it’s not such a bad thing, to have gone through his life constantly wanting, because look where _having it all_ —dads _and_ what they give you—has gotten these two. And anyway, all of that is a sidebar, because what he actually wants to say to Elliot is pretty simple: _for someone who wants to lead you sure seem to do a lot of listening to other people_ , to be followed basically immediately by _and you seem like someone who doesn’t need to listen to your dad._

“My dad was a med captain,” Elliot says, before _he_ can say something inane, here in the present day where she listens probably exclusively to said dad. “I mean, someone has to command the medical ships, right? So usually it’s a doctor with a command specialty. And you still have, like, a CMO, some med captains even have two, actually, one med and one surge, just to round out your perspective, you know? And it’s hard, I guess… well, I _know_... but I really want to—”

“Elliot, you should take a breath,” he cuts in. And then he smiles at her. “I’m a doctor, I should know.”

Until the _exact_ moment she smiles at him and lets out a sigh that seems like she’s been building it for twenty-five years, he’s really not sure whether she’s going to grin at his flirting or roll her eyes. And if he’s honest, he kind of likes that about her. Most people don’t surprise him. The ones that do usually don’t do it by smiling at him so prettily that something in him twists.

And then, something in _her_ twists.

“Well, I’m a doctor, too,” she tells him. He recognizes it immediately: it’s almost certainly the same voice she must have used in her command track interview, and the same voice she’ll use in a bridge test interview, someday. “So I’m not exactly on unfamiliar ground, there. But thanks for the heads up.”

More pretty smiling. More twist, twist, twisting. _Yes, captain_ , he finds himself wanting to say, and you know what true camaraderie is? It’s the way that he knows that someday, it’ll mean an awful lot to hear him say it to her: _as soon as you told me your dreams, I saw you in them. That’s how much you belonged there._

Lucky thing, that must be.

  
  


_that you have the most beautiful face  
_ _(carla)_

The first person on the ship to give him a nickname is Nurse Carla Espinosa, who has also told him her life story and half of everyone else’s by the end of their first lunch together, which has happened before the end of their first _shift_ together.

Carla, he gathers, is a woman who moves fast.

“Dr Cox is a little bit of a curmudgeon,” Carla tells him, almost conspiratorially, at the end of their first week. God, JD _loves_ a co-conspirator. “But you can’t let it bother you. On the inside, he’s a creampuff.”

“Yeah?” God, JD _loves a curmudgeonly creampuff_. What a day. What a week. What a life.

“Yeah. He’s… I don’t know, Bambi. You know how everyone comes to space for a reason?”

JD shoots up straight, because—yes, he _does_ know, but he’s never heard anyone else talk about it before. He thinks he’d listen to Carla talk about anything. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, well I think Dr Cox came to space because he was running away.”

JD frowns. “You don’t think he likes it here?”

“I don’t think he _dislikes_ it here. But I don’t think he’d be here if he hadn’t… he got divorced, you know? Right before he took this assignment?”

“Where was he before?”

“San Francisco.”

 _Oh._ _Wow_ _._ “He was grounded?”

“Yeah.” Carla half-smiles. “So, all I’m saying is… he might try to bother you, at first. But don’t let him. He’s got a good heart, he’s just a little rough around the edges.”

Oh, _God_ , JD’s already in love with him. This bodes... potentially not well for the next five years. Or the next five minutes. Everything in between.

And speaking of the kind of love that moves fast, the kind you look down and you’re surprised to see that it’s grown up everywhere in the five minutes it’s been since you last looked down and realized that the body that once belonged to you now belongs to you and someone else… Turk’s day just wrapped up, too, and when he bursts into Ten Forward to pick JD up and exchange a million stories, he stops dead in his tracks when he sees Carla’s face.

And Carla—who, as previously established, seems like a woman who typically moves pretty fast—grinds to a screeching halt right back.

JD’s wristwatch pings, then. The interstellar network can be a little slow, which means sometimes you’re looking someone in the face before your watch jangles with their notification— _VANILLA BEAR I AM FREE AND I AM_ _INCOMING_ , in this case. _You don’t need to text me_ , JD had insisted that morning, while leaving their room for his shift as Turk had tumbled into the shower after his. _I’m_ _definitely_ _going to remember_. As if he could forget; they’ve been on the ship for almost a week and seen each other for a grand total of twenty minutes due to wildly misaligned shifts, so JD is _definitely_ not going to miss getting drinks for their first coincidental free block. He knows the broad strokes: he knows Turk loves surgery, and he knows there’s a girl in the picture. (Already.) (Obviously.) And he wants to hear _everything_.

But a picture’s worth a thousand words, you know?

JD looks back and forth between Carla Espinosa, who is wearing her uniform like she was born for it, and Chris Turk, who is looking at Carla Espinosa like he was born for it, and he tries to remember the day Turk flew for the first time: how scared he’d been, that Turk’s love for the world around him would take him away, and how quickly Turk had swooped in to insist that love means there’s always room for them to go forward together. 

And here’s the deal about space: when it comes to love, the stakes are really high. Whether things work out right or they work out wrong, you’re living with the fallout for the next five years… here, for the first time in his life, the stakes are high and Turk’s cheeks are even redder than they’d been the day he’d flown for the first time, and it feels like the future could hold _anything_.

JD and Carla have known each other for a grand total of one week, and still, he feels like he knows what to say. He’s been waiting to show Turk off like this to someone who deserves it as much as Carla does for _years_.

“This guy is good at _everything_ and there is adventure in his heart,” he says, taking a sip of a replicated appletini that tastes so much like the real thing that he makes a note to replicate an ibuprofen on the way out. Carla looks back at him and her face splits into a smile before she looks back up at the man he is _absolutely_ not going to call “Chocolate Bear” in front of her until at least their third date. JD looks at Carla looking at Turk, and he looks at Turk looking at Carla, and he can’t help but think: _what a beautiful life this is going to be._

  
  


_wearing holes in your shoes out there  
_ _(perry)_

If something in him had twisted when Elliot Reid had smiled prettily at him, last week, then it’s fair to say that _absolutely everything_ in him pretzels up into a fiery heap of sparks and bullshit when Perry Cox raises an eyebrow at him and barks _alright, you can hop to it anytime you want, there, Belinda_.

Which is not to say that working for Perry—Doctor Cox—Perry Doctor Cox is all sparks and bullshit. Or, anyway… it is _one hundred percent_ sparks and bullshit, often both at the exact same time, but _that_ is not to say that it is all fun and games. In fact, by the end of JD’s second week on shifts with his new attending, he is starting to wonder exactly how many sparks and how much bullshit he can take before the sparks catch, and the bullshit does… well, what bullshit does, and _that_ is to say…

“I think I ought to just leave that one behind entirely,” he says out loud. And when Dr Cox has the audacity to look up and growl at him a little, as if two weeks isn’t enough to get a _perfectly good read_ on John Dorian, with respect to at least theme if not specific content, he very nearly says: _I give._ Perhaps he really has come this far, just to give up.

“I think maybe we all need a break,” Carla suggests.

Bless her.

Beginning with kindergarten, and carrying forth all the way through, apparently, his current existence, two weeks has always been enough time for JD to find the little hiding places it takes to get through the day. Not like Elliot; he knows Elliot uses them to cry where no one can see her, and he’d never begrudge her that—the crying, which he sometimes thinks life would be a whole hell of a lot easier if he could figure out, too, _or_ the wanting to do it quietly, and away from everyone else. Not like Turk, either; he suspects, but has never asked and never been told, that Turk uses these small spaces to go somewhere and allow himself, for a few spare seconds apart from everyone else, to look and feel and sound and resemble in every other way someone who wants to punch through a wall before getting back out there and grinning like someone who’s always known how to triumph over what’s in front of him. 

No, in this way, as in most others, JD seems to have found a way to get through that results in him having very little in common with those around him. He doesn’t cry or yell or break things, so his small stolen spaces often look different than the ones that would volunteer themselves to Turk or Elliot. Instead, he just stares. Outward, if he can find it, and inward if he can’t. And it’s in this that a loop, eight years in the making, is finally closed: John Dorian went to space because the observation deck of a starship is probably the best place in the universe to stare outward.

Every once in a while, it strikes him: what, exactly, it is that they’re doing out here. They are _responsible for keeping people alive_. They are out here, at the edges of the universe, and their job is to seek out new life and celebrate it in the most base way they can: finding what hurts, and soothing it. Finding what’s broken, and fixing it. There isn’t anything that’s ever reminded him of what a heavy, formidable responsibility this is more than staring out the observation deck at the way the universe unfolds before them, reminding him that his part in the great cosmic dance is both small and unwavering.

And then the ship lurches forward, and the stars blur together, and before he can even stop himself, he gasps a little. He can’t believe there was ever a time he hadn’t been certain he was going to leave Ohio.

“In case you were wondering, it never gets old,” Dr Cox’s voice breathes behind him.

JD’s breath is caught somewhere between his lungs and his throat; he’s flown before, of course, but never like _this_. 

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.” Dr Cox’s voice seems funny, and not just because it’s still talking. It feels soft, almost suspended in the air behind him. JD absolutely cannot bear the thought of turning around to see what his mentor’s face looks like, when his voice sounds like this. It’s too much; it’s lily stamens and pollen tickling his nose all over again. 

So of course JD wrecks it.

“We’re off the girls’ names,” he murmurs, eyes still glued to the stars, and Dr Cox just laughs.

“Shakespeare, actually,” he says, and now JD can finally turn to look at him, because this is the sort of familiar ground he knows how to work with. “But don’t worry, Desdemona. I’m a man of many talents.”

“I’ll bet,” JD replies, way too quick and with an earnestness that he knows Dr Cox could twist back against him, if he wanted to, and for one horrible moment he’s seventeen again, in his top-floor, too-small, brightly-lit bedroom spilling light and throwing shapes onto the sidewalk two stories below and wondering what his big brother would do if JD ever set aside the bristly spines that have grown between them since they were small and showed him his underbelly: _you know I think of you when we aren’t in the same room, right? You know I miss you, when we aren’t together?_

He’s spiralling, now, looking out at the stars and knowing that no matter what Dr Cox says to him over the next five seconds or five years, it will always be the same: JD will always fall over himself to show his soft underbelly. Maybe you can only let yourself be made of so many spines for so long before it’s too exhausting. Maybe trying it out with Turk was a mistake—letting himself move through the world on his own terms, using his own words and his own entreaties, had of _course_ meant that he could never go back—not now, not even when it mattered, and he hadn’t been thinking of _that_ when he’d been deciding to let his affection shoot outward… hell, he’d _followed that affection to space_ , and look where it’d gotten him, it’s gotten him…

“Still, it is beautiful,” Dr Cox’s voice interrupts, impossibly and thankfully and most of all non-sensically. “Even if it makes first-timers like our dear Cordelia here flounder about embarrassingly when anyone else would have the good sense to just accept being lost for words.”

“Space?” JD asks, finally turning to face him. His face is lit up in sharp relief and JD realizes in a strange fleeting moment that after all this, he’ll never know exactly what his own face looks like when he’s looking out at the stars.

Perry’s is a pretty good proxy, he thinks, before immediately— _urgently_ —correcting that _Dr Cox’s_ face is a very good proxy, indeed.

“Yep. After all this time, space is the one thing I never pretend not to be awed over,” Dr Cox says. “And God knows I’ve tried.”

“Why would you even want to?” JD asks, before he can stop himself. 

This is almost surely the beginning of a lifelong pattern, and Dr Cox seems to recognize it. JD spares a moment of indignance because this pattern is exactly zero percent easier to recognize than his pattern of non-sequiturs, the same pattern by which Dr Cox had earlier claimed to be flustered or frustrated or whatever he looks like when things get under his skin. He only spares a moment, though—life is too short for indignance, probably—and spares many more moments for the observation that Dr Cox is either much softer on the observation deck than he is everywhere else, or much flintier in the med bay than he is everywhere else.

 _Oh, boy, I can’t wait to find out_ , he thinks, unbidden, and recognizes the thought from that night in the dining hall with Turk. This thought and the pretzels that have been twisting inside JD’s guts from the first day he met Dr Cox combine and he realizes, all in one breath: _holy shit. I really_ _am_ _in trouble._

“Not all of us wanted to be out here, Beatrice,” Dr Cox speaks, haltingly enough that JD decides then and there that, absent any evidence to the contrary, Dr Cox _must_ be softer on the observation deck than anywhere else. Nothing else would explain such a glaring lack of practice.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” JD says confidently, immediately before remembering that time after Turk’s first intramural basketball game when Turk had asked, _dude, do you ever… do people ever tell you you’re like… kind of a lot_? 

(JD’s head had bobbed, and Turk’s face had split into a grin and he’d said: _I mean, I like it. I just want to make sure… you know what, nevermind_. And JD hadn’t asked any questions about that. They’d been good enough friends by then for JD to know that Turk takes care of the things he cares about, and JD had been _alive_ for long enough by then to know the sorts of things that can happen for someone who shows up like he does if someone isn’t caring for them.)

But someone _is_ caring for him—Turk’s been caring for him for some time, now, and it seems like maybe Carla being on the scene isn’t going to change that, and so he for some dumbass reason feels like it’s okay to say things like _well I’m glad you’re here_ to a reluctant mentor he wants to hug and fuck and tell stories with and drink with and probably one billion other things with too after knowing him for two weeks.

Jesus, why hadn’t anyone reminded him how long five years was?

Said reluctant mentor can see this all over his face. He must be able to; JD isn’t that sneaky and Dr Cox isn’t that oblivious. And yet, said mentor says, anyway: “You know what, it _isn’t_ all that bad, Juliet.”

 _Probably don’t read too much into the Juliet thing_ , JD instructs himself, immediately before reading very intensely into the Juliet thing. 

He pulls his PADD out to make a note— _add calendar event: one hour of extremely frantic crew-log entries,_ and Jesus, where the hell is the Todd when you need him—and finds it ripped from his fingertips before he can say anything.

“Early shift tomorrow,” Dr Cox explains, as if that explains anything at all. “Setting a reminder for you—” —as if he couldn’t do that himself?— “—and inputting my pager number in case you need anything between getting your beauty sleep and stumbling back into the real world.”

 _Oh. Wow._ _Wow_ _._

“Ophelia,” Dr Cox begins, frowning as he inputs his override code without so much as asking JD for his own, “why on earth do you have a hundred and eighty-six windows open?”

“Alright, look, give me thaaat.” JD frowns. “Look. Read me your pager number. I’ll put it in. They don’t let you get through med school without being able to operate a touch screen, you know?”

Six weeks later, JD is flying down the hallway, frantic to be the first to retrieve Dr Cox’s PADD from the nurse’s station for him, though he’s about ninety-percent certain no one else is even on the case. (And, really, case is a strong word for it: “can’t find my PADD,” Dr Cox had mused, sitting in the lounge, and JD had shot into action.)

 _I knew it,_ JD thinks, staring down at Dr Cox’s PADD and tracing his eyes over the words “204 open windows”. _I absolutely goddamn knew it_.  
  
And there it is, right in front of him: he _was_ meant to be somewhere, JD was, and moreover… he’s found it, somehow. And he’s right on time. And whatever Dr Cox chooses to show him, whatever small cracks of light he decides to let JD see, whenever he decides to throw open the window sash and yell _Cassandra if you could just get the hell in here already_ into the night air… well, JD will be right there. Elliot will be a captain, and Turk and Carla will be pushing each other to be even better and kinder than they were the day before, and JD… well, we already covered that, didn’t we? JD will be right there.


End file.
